Assessing Project Problems

As impacts from the coronavirus outbreak ripple across the business landscape, many organizations are moving portions of their operations to a more distributed work structure to maintain activities while minimizing face-to-face interactions. This could present challenges for project teams that aren’t already accustomed to working remotely with remote project management. If you’re having trouble juggling…

Project teams have deep insight into their initiatives’ inner workings, but unless executives are involved with projects on a daily basis, they likely don’t have the same level of familiarity. Senior staff members may not know where projects are in terms of progress or resource consumption, or even how one project’s metrics compare to others…

When a company undergoes a restructuring, there’s the potential that projects—those that are active as well as any still working their way through the pipeline—could experience some upheaval. People might be reassigned or let go, budgets may be reallocated, operational workflows are sometimes revised, and the company’s strategic mission is occasionally restated. Maintaining forward momentum…

When time is tight and there’s pressure to get a project underway as quickly as possible, it might be tempting to ignore concerns that might keep you from revising a project plan that is out of whack. You probably know the feeling—you’ve seen the plan but you don’t think it can possibly be executed as…

One important skill PMPs possess is the ability to spot trends and determine what impact they may have on a project. That same competency can benefit the team in other ways, too. Aside from typical concerns—difficult labor market conditions, lack of raw materials availability, etc.—project teams should also be attuned to internal trends that could…

Dear Stakeholders: We have a problem. If you dread communicating project glitches to customers, take heart—telling folks your project is facing issues is rarely a fun task, but we have some suggestions on how (and why) to get bad news out in the open.